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Monday, November 19, 2012

"The horrendous atrocities that were unleashed on
the Indian people of the Amazon during the height of the rubber boom
were like nothing that had been seen since the first days of the
Spanish Conquest."

Only
twice in my life have I been tempted to get a tattoo. Once, the
tempting offer to bond with a lunatic I was having a brief but
unhappy relationship around and about. She, hoping to keep our
relationship alive or sputtering, suggested we could get "his
and hers matching tattoos." I gave this idea some thought as
hard and heavy as lead, and considering the nature of love and stuff
I finally agreed, basing my suggestion on her personality, her
interests, her unmistakable charmliness that shone through an
otherwise weird personality, and then my budget: I said, “Knowing
you as I do, and loving you for all you are worth, I think we should
get his and hers matching tattoos of a Walmart logo.”

[Just think "Walmart" and we won't have to post the logo itself.]

The
other temptation to tattoo was an offer of “Bring Back Mr. Ellis.”
I'm averse to gratuitous pain (against me, of course,) and as the best place for such a
tattoo is on my neck, I declined. But was it ever close!

In
what has to be the coincidence of my long life I wrote the above
without giving any thought at all to Roger Casement being hanged by "Mr.
Ellis." But of course they would have met. And, as this story to come
is about Roger Casement in large part and since the book I can't find,
Vargas Llosa, Dreams of the Celt is about this story, the two
come together in a way I had not considered till looking for a link to
Mr. Ellis, finding an excerpt from the book in question.

"Could I take a bath today?" he [Roger Casement] asked before he went in.

The fat jailer shook his head, looking into his eyes with the same repugnance Roger had detected in the clerk's gaze.

"You
cannot bathe until the day of your execution," said the sheriff,
relishing each word. "And, on that day, only if it's your final wish.
Others, instead of a bath, prefer a good meal. A bad business for Mr.
Ellis, because then, when they feel the noose, they shit themselves. And
leave the place like a pigsty. Mr. Ellis is the hangman, in case you
didn't know."

It is no coincidence at
all that the worst book ever written, the drivel by James Redfield,
The Celestine Prophecy, is set in an imaginary Iquitos and is in some
part about coincidences. Were I only a slightly less moral man I
might envision Redfield meeting Mr Ellis as well. Some folks beg to
be hanged.

Yes,
some folks are justly begging to be hanged, and when they go through
an easy life that would shock Ecclesiastes with the injustice of it
one truly longs for Mr. Ellis, the stage name, as it were, of British
hangmen. That at least some of the Rubber Barons weren't hauled off
and hanged is an outrage. Roger Casement was hanged instead. Such is
life. Brutally unfair. And such, in a large but actually small part,
is the life of early Iquitos, Peru. Some of the Rubber Barons were
very bad people, and they acted so in Iquitos for a few decades,
committing murder and bringing shame to humanity. Some of the Rubber
Barons deserved to be hanged. Didn't happen. Too bad. I woulda got
the tee shirt-- and the tattoo. Instead, we can look at the story in
broad sweep and see what went wrong, and from there perhaps we can
see our way clear of repetition. I suspect the nature of man will
never truly change. There will always be Rubber Barons of one sort
or another. In my secret heart I do feel the best solution is to
bring back Mr. Ellis.

Historically, the most
notorious Rubber Baron was Peru's Julius Cesar Arana, know to most
who know of him at all in Vargas Llosa's novel. But the most
widely-known is fictional in a different way. “Undoubtedly
today the most famous of the Amazonian rubber barons is the fictional
Irishman Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald Fitzcarraldo,”
brought to the world on screen by German filmmaker Werner Herzog in
1982.

It is hard to tell which was more incredible, the true
story of Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald or the making of the film
Fitzcarraldo. Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald in no way resembled
the benevolent character of the movie. He was a brutal rubber baron
who when he encountered indigenous people gave them the choice to
work for him under cruel conditions or die. Yes, if they refused to
work for him, they were executed! Despite his brutality, he was a
innovative explorer.

Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald died at the age of 35 during
the accident that sank his ship.

Fitzcarrald
not only has a major street named after him in central Iquitos, there
is a Municipality
of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald.
Not a good man, as we judge by the standards of our time; nor was he
a good man by the standards of his own. But as bad as Fitzcarrald
was, he is not near the monster as was Julio Cesar Arana, Rubber
Baron
par excellence.

Julio
Cesar Arana

Arana (B. 1864 – D. 1952) was born Rioja,Peru. At 14
he was employed in the hat trade under his father. “In 1879 his
father sent him to work as a secretary, where he learned business
administration and bookkeeping, but by 1881 he was again trading on
the Amazon, bartering a range of goods (including hats) for rubber.
By 1889 he had established a rubber-collecting business with his
brother-in-law, Pablo Zumaeta, in Tarapoto....

Arana is at the centre of the Putumayo Affair, a scandal of slavery
and murder on a genocidal scale in the Amazon, propelled by the
demand for rubber and a lack of moral restraint by some men who
delved into the heart of darkness, longing for riches of the world,
in the process becoming the jungle itself.

“Arana founded the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC) in
1907. “The company operated in the area of the Putumayo river, a
river that flows from the Andes to join the Amazon River deep in the
tropical jungle. This area was contested at the time between Peru,
Colombia, Ecuador, while also being inhabited by large numbers of
indigenous
people.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_Amazon_Company#cite_note-brit1911-0

Putumayo

“The
Putumayo is a major river in is own right, some 3,000 miles long,
which rises in the mountains on the west coast of Colombia and joins
the Amazon in Brazil. For much of its length it forms the border
between Peru and Columbia or Ecuador and Columbia. It was in this
region, in an area about the size of Belgium, that one Julio Cesar
Arana built his rubber empire.”

The territory in question is an area of some 12,000
square miles which is largely confined to a triangle of land formed
by the Putumayo and two of its tributaries, the Cara-Paraná and the
Caquetá (known in Brazil as the Japura). The easternmost point of
this triangle lies some 400 miles up the Putumayo from that river’s
confluence with the Amazon. It is the Putumayo which now delimits the
frontier between Peru and Colombia. This region of tropical rain
forest was inhabited by native peoples who were coerced into
harvesting the local second-grade rubber known as sernambi,
whose commercial value depended on the virtually free labour of the
gatherers. The system had been set up by Julio Cesar Arana at the
turn of the century, and in 1907 he took advantage of the rubber
speculation on the London stock market to set up a limited company
with a capital of £1,000,000. (The 12,000 square miles of forest
that he had acquired by 1906 had cost him a total of £116,700.) The
first English-language news of the atrocities perpetrated by the
Peruvian Amazon Company was published in the magazine Truth in
September 1909 and it was these accounts by the American railway
engineer Walter Hardenburg, who had been held prisoner by the
company, that prompted the British Foreign Office to request that
[roger] Casement accompany the investigating commission sent to Peru
by the London board of directors the following year.

The company participated in abuses and criminal actions
against laborers in the area. A movement grew to stop the abuse and
eventually led to the end of the company. The Anti-Slavery and
Aborigines Protection Society was one of the activist groups working
to stop the abuses.

W.E. [Walter Ernest]
Hardenburg wrote a scathing article in the British magazine Truth.
The British government in 1910 sent the consul-general Roger Casement
to investigate. His report also denounced the activities of the
company. A Select Committee of the House of Commons published a paper
on the investigations in 1913. The British Board of Directors was
considered not criminally liable. However, the Parliament and others
moved to tighten up anti-slavery laws. World War I interrupted this
work.

Among the findings by
the various investigatory parties were wide spread debt bondage,
slavery, torture, mutilation, and many other crimes in the Amazonian
Rubber industry, with Putumayo area being but one example. Religious
leaders such as Manuel Polit, Bishop of Cuenca in Ecuador, denounced
these activities and worked to reform the system. There were also
organizations such as the Sociedad Pro-Indigena. The area governments
also attempted to implement measures to control the abuses, but it
was difficult in the large countryside.

Whilst
Arana was in London the scandal opened at the instigation of Benjamin
Saldana Rocca who filed criminal complaints against Arana and his
companies for rape, murder and torture of the Indian tappers, their
wives and children. Even though Rocca ran his own newspaper and
campaigned vigorously against Arana for many months, the courts were
totally inactive so Rocca decided that his stories and the evidence
he possessed needed a wider audience.

He was lucky to recruit, through his son, a young American, W E
Hardenburg, to his cause. Hardenburg had been badly treated by Arana
and was certainly after revenge although he was later to be described
as “a man of simple Christian standards” and as an idealist by
his biographer. Whatever his motivations, Hardenburg was happy to set
sail for London in July 1909 with masses of documentary evidence that
Britain, the world leaders in antislavery legislation in the 19th
century, was home to a company practicing all the most terrible of
activities associated with slavery in the 20th century!

In London he met the Revered John H Harris of the Anti-slavery and
Aborigines Protection Society who had just finished his decade-long
campaign against Leopold and the Congo rubber trade. Harris then
introduced Hardenburg to Sydney Paternoster of the newspaper “Truth”
who was able to confirm enough of Rocca’s story to continue the
crusade in his paper. His allegations included rape, torture and
murder of the natives and emphasised that the PAC was a British
company. The uproar the articles caused could not be ignored and in
May 1910 the Foreign Office asked Roger Casement, who had also been
involved in exposing the Congo horrors, to investigate. He traveled
throughout the Putumayo region and reported that the fundamentals of
Rocca/Hardenburg’s allegations were based on fact. He demanded that
the law should take its course and in order to prevent a Government
cover-up, as he had experienced with his reports from the Congo, he
copied his report to the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection
Society. (This was probably sensible as it took until 1912 for the UK
Government to actually publish his report).

At this point it should be pointed out that other voices were being
raised against Arana with the governments of Columbia, Ecuador and
Peru all being concerned with the tales coming out of the Putumayo.
However, nationalism and politics were used to obscure the truth.
Columbia and Ecuador used the stories to take the moral high ground
and to reinforce their territorial claims on the area whilst Arana
roused all patriotic Peruvians to help him, blaming soldiers from the
other two countries for the atrocities. The Peruvian government had
been continuing its investigations of Arana and spurred on by
articles in the “serious” press it directed Judge Carlos Valcácel
to investigate. This appointment fell through and it was left to
Judge Rómulo Paredos to set off and initiate Peru’s formal
investigation in early 1911. Four months later he returned with his
evidence which, when documented, came to 1242 pages and confirmed all
that had been said about the horrors of the Putumayo. Valcácel
supported Paredos and issued over 200 arrest warrants but the
pro-Arana camp was so powerful and vociferous that he [Paredos]
quickly realised his life was in danger and fled the country. The
courts cancelled the warrants.

Arana [argued that] his company was a strong civilising force in the
wilds of the jungle and he was promoting Peru’s national interests
and international position. To say otherwise was simply unpatriotic.
At a national level this argument could appeal to a compliant
government, but Peru was now facing a rising tide of anger in the UK
and, perhaps more importantly, by 1912 the growth of Asian plantation
rubber was starting to threaten the wild Amazonian material. The
writing was on the wall for the Peruvian economy! America was sitting
on the fence for fear of upsetting its South American neighbours
whilst Brazil was keeping a very low profile as it was well aware
that “the Putumayo Affair” was not unique but fairly typical of
rubber collecting throughout the Amazon and related basins.

The publication of (now Sir Roger) Casement’s report in 1912 by the
UK government contained figures which could no longer be ignored.
Casement calculated that at least 30,000 natives had been directly
murdered or killed by deliberate starvation brought about by crop
destruction for a gain of 4,000 tons of rubber in the Putumayo region
alone in the first 12 years of the century. On November 5th 1912 a UK
Parliamentary Committee began six months of hearings into the affair.
Hardenburg, Harris, Paternoster and Casement all gave evidence as did
Arana himself and three members of the board of PAC. Arana’s
defence was two-pronged – Nobody had told him what was going on, he
had not witnessed anything himself and his accusers were all of bad
character and unreliable. He had to accept Casement’s evidence but,
as he had already said, he knew nothing of the atrocities himself.

The Committee’s report showed its opinion of Arana, accusing him of
“callous indifference and guilty knowledge” whilst it accused the
board members of “negligent ignorance”. It further concluded that
the Putumayo affair was only one shockingly bad instance of
conditions liable to be found over a wide area in South America.

The British courts could not imprison Arana who returned to Peru and
continued his business. Britain tried to persuade Peru, Brazil and
the US to close his business down but to no avail. In 1914 the First
World War led to a sustained demand for all Amazonian rubber and the
PAC survived until 1920.

Arana’s business interests continued however and in 1932 he,
together with his son and daughter, were involved with a “Patriotic
Junta” which attempted to reclaim land ceded to Columbia by Peru a
decade earlier. This resulted in a full-scale but brief war between
the two countries, stopped under pressure from the US. The losers
were, as always, the Indians and, this time, Arana himself who lost
the lands he was fighting to regain.

[Enter photo of tomb of Peruvian soldiers.]

Arana retired at 69 and lived until 1952 where he died in poverty
outside Lima.

At a time in Britian when Irish novelist and playwright Oscar
Wilde was being persecuted and imprisoned for homosexuality, Roger
Casement was the British consul in charge of reporting to the
government on conditions in the Putumayo district of the Amazon.
Casement kept two diaries of his time in the Amazon, the official
“White Diaries” and his personal “Black Diaries.” Casement,
too, an Irish writer, was a homosexual. In today's parlance Casement
would be known almost solely as a human rights activist.

[W]ednesday,
21 September 1910, found Roger Casement on board the Liberal,
steaming rapidly up the River Igara-Paraná, one week after leaving
Iquitos, and almost exactly two months after setting sail from
Southampton on the Edinburgh Castle. The ‘White Diary,’ which
records his findings in harrowing detail, covers the period from 23
September to 6 December, when he left Iquitos again, this time on his
way downstream to Manaus and thence to Europe. The parallel ‘Black
Diary,’ which includes details of Casement’s sexual encounters,
covers almost the whole of 1910, from 13 January to 31 December.
Those in search of prurient titillation will almost certainly be
disappointed with the content of the ‘Black Diary,’ whose sexual
information is largely limited to reports of penis sizes and shapes
and accounts of associated financial transactions. Given that
Casement’s homosexual preferences no longer arouse the horror
expressed by his contemporaries, the diary is far more interesting
for the light that it sheds upon the thought processes that are set
down in its companion volume.

Roger Casement, Iquitos, Peru

Although
he does not go as far as to equate the situation of his oppressed
countrymen with that of the tortured indigenous people that he is
investigating there are a number of indications that he perceives a
parallel between the two.

When he was attached
as a consular representative to a commission investigating murderous
rubber slavery by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company,
effectively controlled by the archetypal rubber baron Julio Cesar
Arana and his brother, Casement had the occasion to do work among the
Putumayo Indians of Peru similar to that which he had done in the
Congo. Public outrage in Britain over the abuses against the Putumayo
had been sparked in 1909 by articles in the British magazine Truth.
Casement paid two visits to the region, first in 1910 and then a
follow-up in 1911. In a report to the British foreign secretary,
dated 17 March 1911, Casement detailed the rubber company's use of
stocks to punish the Indians:

Men,
women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often
months. ... Whole families ... were imprisoned--fathers, mothers, and
children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either
from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their
offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery
themselves the dying agonies of their parents.

Sir Roger Casement was a humanitarian campaigner and an
Irish patriot, poet, revolutionary, and nationalist.

He was a British consul by
profession, famous for his reports and activities against human
rights abuses in the Congo and Peru and also for his dealings with
Germany before Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916. An Irish nationalist
and Parnellite in his youth, he worked in Africa for commercial
interests and latterly in the service of Britain. However, the Boer
War and his consular investigation into atrocities in the Congo led
Casement to anti-Imperialist and ultimately to Irish Republican and
separatist political opinions. He sought to obtain German support for
a rebellion in Ireland against British rule. Shortly before the
Easter Rising, he landed in Ireland and was arrested. He was
subsequently convicted and executed by the British for treason.

There has been controversy over a set of "black"
diaries, copies of which were circulated selectively by the British
authorities following Casement's conviction, which, if accepted as
genuine, would portray Casement as a promiscuous homosexual with a
fondness for young men. Given prevailing views on homosexuality at
the time, circulation of the diaries helped undermine support for
clemency for Casement.

After his return to Britain, he repeated his
extra-consular campaigning work by organising Anti-Slavery Society
and mission interventions in the region, which was disputed between
Peru and Colombia. Some of the men exposed as killers in his report
were charged by Peru, while others fled. Conditions in the area
undoubtedly improved as a result, but the contemporary switch to
farmed rubber in other parts of the world was a godsend to the
Indians as well.

In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before
the [Easter] rising began, Casement was put ashore at Banna Strand in
Tralee Bay, County Kerry. Too weak to travel, he was discovered at
McKenna's Fort (an ancient ring fort now called Casement's Fort) in
Rathoneen, Ardfert, and subsequently arrested on charges of treason,
sabotage and espionage against the Crown. He was taken straight to
the Tower of London where he was imprisoned....

That some allowed themselves a full plunge into moral madness is not to say all did or that even many did. Nor is it to say that many turned a blind eye to the atrocities of the Rubber Boom. When people became aware of the conditions facing people they knew not nor anything about other than that their fellow human beings were mistreated, sometimes even tortured and murdered, they, the public, put an end to it. Such is the power of people in a commercial economy. an American brought some pressure to bear as well as did the Irishman Casement. One might someday wonder why the public is so lax in thinking about people of the Amazon today who are at least as harshly treated by drug lords as they were previously by Rubber Barons. Perhaps taking cocaine dulls ones moral sense to the point of oblivion in ways rubber tyres of automobiles do not.

Stuart Fuller, U.S. Consul at Iquitos,
Peru reports atrocities in Putumayo district and levels charges
against the Peruvian Amazon Company in three preliminary reports.

Fuller “found that natives had been
burned alive for petty offenses, in some cases kerosene oil being
poured on them. Spanish and West Indian men [Barbadians] acting as
agents of the company exercised the power of life and death over the
Indians.

In one case as many as ten men and
women were decapitated because they were too weak to march and keep
up with an expedition. Every kind of ingenuity in torture has been
preacticed by the rubber agents. In some cases men and boys were held
under water to make them agree to work. In others they were hung up
in chains until they were unconscious.”

2 Dec. 1912. New York Times.

For the Aranas and Fitzcarralds of the world there are Casements to rise up against them. There are W.E. Hardenburgs. We might never find justice on this earth but it is the dream of this Celt that we can do battle against evil and sometimes not hang for it ourselves.

Next time we'll have a look at W.E. Hardenburg.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here: